RowlodeCSV shows garbled characters in Excel (é, ü, ש)
If café shows up as café, the file is UTF-8 but Excel read it as Windows-1252. If you see ? or boxes, characters were already lost when the file was saved in a legacy encoding.
Updated 2026-10-26 · 4 min read
Recognise the problem
| You see | Cause |
|---|---|
| é ü ñ ’ | UTF-8 file read as Windows-1252 |
| ×©×œ×•× (Hebrew), ال (Arabic) | Same, for right-to-left text |
| ? or □ | Saved in an encoding that can't hold the characters – data loss |
| Every second character blank | UTF-16 file read as 8-bit |
Open it correctly in Excel
Data › From Text/CSV › File origin: 65001 : Unicode (UTF-8) › Load. Excel shows a preview, so you can confirm the characters before loading.
Save a CSV that Excel opens right on double-click
Excel detects UTF-8 reliably when the file starts with a BOM (byte order mark). In Excel: Save As › CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) writes one. In Rowlode: export CSV with UTF-8 + BOM; it also converts from 22 legacy encodings (Windows-1250…1257, ISO-8859, KOI8-R, Shift_JIS, GB18030, Big5…), detects UTF-16, and lets you pick the encoding when auto-detection guesses wrong.
When not to add a BOM
Some import scripts and older Unix tools treat the BOM as part of the first column name. For databases, prefer UTF-8 without BOM and specify the encoding in the import.
Have a big or messy CSV? Rowlode opens CSV files with millions of rows (multi-GB) in your browser, reading them from disk – filter, remove duplicates, sort, fix delimiter and encoding, and export CSV, Excel (split under the row limit), TSV, JSON or NDJSON. Nothing is uploaded. Viewing, filtering and dedupe are free; each export holds the first 10,000 rows until you buy a $12 lifetime license.
Questions and answers
Can I repair a file that already shows ?
No – the original characters were replaced. Get a fresh export from the source system in UTF-8.
Which encoding does my bank/ERP export use?
Often Windows-1252 (Western Europe) or the local Windows code page. Open it with Rowlode or Excel's File origin preview and try the candidates.
Sources and product names: Microsoft Support: Import or export text files; Unicode FAQ on the byte order mark (unicode.org). Microsoft Excel and Power Query are trademarks of Microsoft; Google Sheets is a trademark of Google. Rowlode is independent and not affiliated with them.